Container Gardening

If you are looking for a great multi-use, easy-to-grow herb for your containing garden, you can’t go too wrong growing parsley.

Herbs in general are much easier to grow in containers than other vegetables, and parsley in particular is an easy grower.  It’s a biennial plant, so will keep returning, but the second year plants tend to go to seed very fast, so it’s best to start fresh every year.

How to Plant Parsley

You can grow parsley from seed, but it takes up to 2-3 weeks to germinate, which is a long time for new gardeners.  Fortunately, you can buy parsley seedlings inexpensively at your local garden center or nursery.  Growing parsley from seedlings is much simpler.  To plant parsley seedlings, just dig a hole in the dirt and place the parsley seedling in, covering the roots shallowly.

How to Grow Parsley

Parsley is tolerant of many soil conditions, but it does best in well-drained, slightly acidic soil, pH 6.0-7.0.  For container growing, a standard peat-based potting mix with 3-month fertilizer will keep your parsley growing and thriving for a full season.  After 5-6 months, if your parsley is still going strong, you can fertilize monthly: this will be plenty.

Full sun is best for growing parsley, but if daily temperatures reach above 90F, they may start to wilt.  Move them to partial shade if the daily heat gets to be too much for them.  One advantage to container gardening is that it’s very easy to move your garden based on weather conditions!

How to Harvest Parsley

You can start harvesting your parsley when it reaches 6″ tall and is relatively thick.  As with all herbs, you should never remove more that 1/3 of the plant at a time.

Parsley grows from the center of the plant, putting up new stems and leaves all the time.  Because of this, you should harvest from the outside, taking whole stems and cutting near the base of the plant.  Harvested stems will grow back very quickly!

How to Use Parsley

Parsley’s flavor is very mild, but adds freshness to a dish.  It’s very important not to over-cook parsley: you can add it at the very end of the cooking process, tossing noodles or salads with it, or stirring it into a sauce.  Italian parsley, with its flat leaves, has more flavor than the curly varieties, but if you’re looking for garnishes, curly parsley is the way to go.

Enjoy!

One of the fun new gardening gadgets out there for curious experimenters right now is the Aerogarden. The Aerogarden is an aeroponic growing system for small plants, completely self-contained. It works like hydroponics, without dirt or mess, just air and moisture and lush plants.

It looks like a great idea, right? But before you shell out over $100 for one, you want to know: does the Aerogarden work? In my experience, the answer is “yes, to a point.”

To start with, the Aerogarden is incredibly easy to use. It gives detailed setup instructions, and has coded lights to tell you when to add water or add nutrients. It turns its grow lights on and off on a regular schedule designed to be best for the plants. You don’t need to know anything about gardening to use it.

Most Aerogardens start you with the Gourmet Herb Seed Kit, and I would definitely advise starting with that one. It contains two kinds of basil, parsley, chives, thyme, mint, and dill. The plants grow incredibly quickly. A few months in, I was chopping off handfuls of herbs to give away to friends and family because I could not use them quickly enough. A month after that, I was chopping off handfuls to compost, because I couldn’t give them away fast enough.

The herbs are the most successful plant for the Aerogarden, in my experience. It is fun to experiment with others: I liked being able to eat cherry tomatoes right off the vine in February, for example, and the lettuce mixes are fun, but in terms of value, I never got the same high-quality, consistent yield I got from herbs with another seed kit.

A few words of warning:

* The Aerogarden’s light is BRIGHT, and depending on your crop, it will be on 16-20 hours a day. You can tell it what time to turn off, but you don’t want to place it anywhere that a bright light coming on would wake you up.

* The Aerogarden is a WATER HOG. Our tap water is poor enough that it doesn’t work well with the nutrient tablets, so we use partly spring water. This can get expensive. Most people’s tap water seems to do fine with the Aerogarden, so take this caution with a grain of salt.

* It is expensive to maintain an Aerogarden. The initial expense is the easy part to see, but even once you’ve paid for the Aerogarden, you will need to replace your grow bulbs regularly, and just the new seed kits cost $20 each. It is an ongoing expense, and you want to make sure the value of the veggies or herbs is worth it to you.

Overall, I am very happy with my Aerogarden. I value fresh herbs highly, and this lets me have them all through the winter. If fresh herbs don’t make as much of a difference to you, it might be too high a cost to pay, but for real lovers of fresh food, it’s a good investment, albeit a significant one.

So, you’re looking to get started in container gardening, but you don’t know what to grow?  We can help!  Here is a list of five edible plants that grow well in containers.

1. Herbs
If you don’t have much experience with container gardening, herbs are hands-down the best place to start. 

With a little care and nurturing, you can keep a basil plant alive on your kitchen windowsill through a winter, and it is even easier to plant a container bed with several herbs at once to thrive through the summer months.  I always start my herbs from seedlings.  If you have an urn or windowbox, consider planting several varieties side-by-side.  I keep basil, parsley, chives, tarragon, oregano, and thyme in mine.  Find out what you use most!

2. Tomatoes
Depending on how much space you have, you can opt for the right style of tomato plant for you.  If you are limited in space, you can grow cherry tomatoes in baskets: they’re both decorative and tasty.  Good varieties to try for that include Florida Basket Tomatoes and Anmore Dewdrop Tomatoes.  Get more info on Growing Cherry Tomatoes in Containers.

If you have more space, you can upgrade to larger tomatoes in pots and planters of five gallons or more.  Roma tomatoes grow very well in pots.  Remember to stake and water well, and you can get a great harvest.

3. Radishes
Radishes can be a lot of fun to grow, especially with children, because they are very quick to grow and don’t need much space.  You can plant them in a windowbox or a little planter and have a harvest in 3-4 weeks!  Moisten the soil in a pot, plant radish seeds, and cover with 1/4 inch of soil.  Cover the pot with plastic wrap until the seeds sprout.  3 weeks after that, your radishes will be ready to eat!

4. Lettuce
Lettuce is a pretty plant, and works well as combination vegetable and ornamental container plant.  I like to plant it in windowboxes, for a nice bit of greenery.  They don’t need too much depth, but be sure to space the plants adequately.  Following the instructions on the package should be fine.  One advantage to lettuce is that you can find good partial shade varieties, which can help if you don’t get much direct sun.

5. Squash
In my experience, summer squashes are a terrifically forgiving plant.  You need a good-sized pot for container squash, but if you get a pot of around five gallons or more and try to keep them watered, you can get a fabulous crop from them.  Keep in mind, squash plants (especially zucchini) like to spread out and fill space.  You need to either prune them back or be prepared for crazy trailing leaves and vines.

Nearly any vegetable you can grow in the ground can be grown in a container, provided the container is big enough.  These suggestions should help you get started, but feel free to experiment on your own and find what works best for you.  Good luck!